Is there something different about our native soil, that if we do leave, we carry it with us like the earth in a vampire’s coffin? I think so. Because to be Southern is to see from a...
Untrod Ground: Civil War History Today
Is there any better-trod topic in American history than the Civil War? In 2002 the Library of Congress estimated that 50,000 to 70,000 books and monographs about the conflict had appeared...
Is the New South No South?
There are ghosts and vestiges and remnants in the abandoned fields and near the wrecked cottages where the big signs are planted. These interruptions in the strip are not shiny or...
Portfolio: Paintings
I have been asked how my work is informed by place. Memory must surely play a role. Many of the subjects I depict I have known since childhood. My father’s family settled here in the...
Portfolio: Architecture
Architectural vernaculars at their best are like familiar faces in which we can recognize a deep character and rediscover the essential qualities we value most in architecture. We seek to...
Revelations
Emma looked at the map she had sketched, but it seemed the earth had slanted funny and the brown dirt was slipping away beneath her. With the Iyalode’s walking about the map, the area of...
Say Amen
For Avon skin-so-soft and the Liberty Baptist Church, the Family Dollar discount grocery, this thunderstorm,
Tomorrow’s Bread
Eben rolled to a stop in front of the church, sat and studied it as he often did—the white cross centered beneath the gable peak, the uneven stones of the front walk, the two rocking...
Screen Shot: New Orleans
My brain and heart dug deep and fast to solve the puzzle and delivered their answer in an instant. The building labeled Hammond City Hall on screen was the old courthouse in Gretna, a...
The Forgotten Town, The Forgotten Backwater
Upon entering Grundy, you know that you’re in the belly of southwest Virginia, with mountain roads uniquely steep in some places and obtrusively curvy in others. You don’t need an...
Winter 2013
What gives a city, town, or region its character? How do artists engage place in their works? Does location matter? In the Winter 2013 issue of South Writ Large, contributors reflect on “sense of place,” as it exists in the realm of memory and imagination as much as in mere latitude and longitude. Contributor Michael Malone says, “Landscape is an invaluable gift to a writer. But distance from that landscape can also open doors to roads otherwise never taken, and so making ‘all the difference.’” This issue’s contributors consider a Baptist church in Charlotte, North Carolina; the coal town of Grundy, Virginia; the South Carolina Lowcountry; and a nineteenth-century Nigerian village. They map historical topography to discern how the familiar terrain of Civil War history is shifting; they analyze films that erase the beloved features of distinctive cities like New Orleans; and they explore the way architecture, the most concrete art of form, defines place. Take a walk with them and see what sense of place means to you.